Weekend of Tournaments

My freshman and sophomore college roommate Ben and his girlfriend Lauren were in town this past week. We played a little 1-2 NL and several smallish tournaments (mostly around $100 buyins). Ben won two of the five tournaments we played (although one of them had only 9 players), and cashed in all but one.

The second tournament Ben won was at Sam's town. I arrived a bit drunk (don't worry, a friend drove me), and about 45 minutes into the tournament, but they let me buy in at that point and I managed to triple my stack in the first several hands. It seems that if you are obviously drunk, people are much more willing to call your raises with ace high or bottom pair. Meanwhile, Ben had built his stack up to become one of the chip leaders, and he was eventually moved over to my table as players were eliminated. Playing shorthanded, the blinds were becoming overwhelming and my M was down around 5. I decided to try to steal the blinds with 87o. Ben decided to call me with a meager A5s. The flop was A44, leaving me almost dead. The turn was another 4, leaving me with absolutely no chance to win the pot. I did have one out for a split though, and sure enough, the case 4 came on the river. We both played the board.... but I was knocked out near the money a while later on a bad beat (AA heads up, all-in preflop).

The one tournament Ben failed to cash in was the noon tournament at Caesars. This time I fared much better, placing fourth out of almost 150. Actually, we agreed to a split at the end. The tournament director had some sort of computer program to determine fair payouts corresponding to everyone's ship counts at the final table. I held out for an extra $75 or so. I really would have preferred playing, but I had other engagements, and Ben had been wiating for me for several hours and wanted to get the hell out of Caesars (the only place his luck had failed him). Frustratingly, the tournament director took a full hour to give us our money, and this was after we had just spent about 20 minutes agreeing on how the chop would work. Other than the long wait for our cash, the tournament was well-run, I thought.

In our last tournament, an evening one at Binion's, I convinced Lauren to let me pay 90% of her entry fee if I would get 90% of her winnings. She did pretty well, lasting much longer than I did, but failed to earn me any money. Ben, on the other hand, came in 6th (they paid 10). He had been chip leader but ran into some bad luck at the final table, where the initial pots were so big that there was absolutely no room to maneuver beyond pushing all-in pre-flop.